2022 Inspo: Obsessive Artist Memoirs

Writing is not a race, but it is a marathon!

I’m in a buoyant mood at the start of 2022 (Omicron won’t get me down!) because I’ve read a couple of memoirs that have given me a lot of clarity about my relationship to writing and I want to share them with you.

First is Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, which I didn’t know existed until came across it at Autumn Leaves Bookstore on a trip to Ithaca, NY; this is why browsing in bookstores must never die. Murakami has that rare quality of being driven by the need to create without a lot of preoccupation with competition, a quality that I alas do not have (I blame parents who didn’t pay attention to me unless I was cute or smart wah). This impulse is also clear in his drive to run marathons not to win them (because that’s impossible) but just to be in touch with the limits of his capabilities.

This perspective has really shifted my relationship to my writing. I’ve always had a really tense relationship with work because I often retreat to it as a way of tuning emotions out, but reading Murakami’s memoir has put me in much better touch of what writing can and can’t do for me. It has also driven home that I have to be a lot more focused if I have any chance of being able to write to my fullest potential, which has helped me immensely in tuning out distractions since I read the memoir two weeks ago (check in with me in a month or two!).

The other memoir I read recently is David Hallberg’s A Body of Work, about his life as a ballet dancer who was a principal at American Ballet Theatre and the first American principal at the Bolshoi. Hallberg writes with so much humility and never overestimates his talents, choosing not to rest on his natural gifts and instead work on every small detail of his technique. His book is such an important reminder to keep working not for what external rewards the work can bring you, but purely for its own sake.

Happy writing,
Meredith